At former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's funeral in July, the streets were lined with people carrying flowers.
Even now, the shock of Abe’s assassination is still fresh. Whereas the United States loses thousands of lives every year to gun violence (owing to an absence of gun-safety laws), Japan’s annual toll of gun deaths tends to be in the single digits.
Many of those present to mourn Abe would have been young workers who got their first jobs because of his economic program, dubbed Abenomics. During Abe’s long second term — from the end of 2012 to September 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic — Japan added approximately 5 million net new jobs.